Budget a bridge too far?

I've never before seen such political commentary in Australia (well not since the "80's when I got here from NZ) so scathing are the criticisms of Abbott and his budget. He is being flayed alive. There was anger before the budget with all the bullshit rumours being leaked about it, but nothing like this.

I've never seen the senate have such an immediate, strong, and unified opposition to any budget. As Christine Milne of the Greens stated, "This budget is in a class of it's own".

Indeed, Australians never expected anything like this. Such policies are for foreign lands. We are proud of our healthcare system in Australia. Yet Abbott's taking an axe to it. For no reason. Who would've voted for him if they knew he was going to do that? Of course the electorate feels betrayed; they have been. 

Mike Carlton puts it beautifully:   

Actually, someone on $200,000 a year would pay around an extra $210 in tax, the cost of a business lunch. And the politicians' wage freeze is derisory. On $507,000 a year, Abbott is one of the world's best paid leaders, doing rather better than Barack Obama earning the equivalent of $425,000 or, say, the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who scrapes by on $161,000. 

With Orwellian deceit, Abbott insists that "we have fundamentally kept faith with the Australian people". In fact, he and Smokin' Joe Hockey have brought down an oppressive, grasping budget. It is not so much a fiscal document as a political tract, driven by a brutal conservative ideology in which ordinary people are lashed to the wheels of "the market" and conscripted to serve an economy which should be serving them. 

It is a delicious irony that Abbott has destroyed the faith the voters placed in him. Endlessly blackguarding Julia Gillard for her broken carbon tax promise and trumpeting himself as a paragon of probity, he raised the bar. 

On Tuesday he fell beneath it, face down in the mud, and will never be trusted again. Read more